The Big Red Machine: How the Liberal Party Dominates Canadian Politics
By Stephen Clarkson
UBC Press, 335 pages, $24.95
Liberals are the least bookish of Canada's partisans. The shelves of opposition supporters fairly groan with F.A. Hayek, Herbert Marcuse or Michel Foucault. Go to a Grit household, however, and one finds merely a worn copy of Jean Chrétien's Straight from the Heart, bios of FDR, JFK and LBJ, and Trudeau albums on the coffee table. Filling the shelves instead are signed photographs of your hosts with assorted prime ministers.
If Canadian Liberals are generally unenthusiastic consumers of political writing, its producers — mostly political scientists — steer clear of the Grits. Indeed, much of the literature on the federal Liberals comes from one place: the fruitful intellectual and personal partnership of Stephen Clarkson and Christina McCall (now sadly deceased). McCall's enthralling Grits (1982), Clarkson and McCall's two-volume Trudeau and Our Times (1990 and 1994) and now Clarkson's The Big Red Machine rightly form the core of the modern Liberal library.
To make this book, Clarkson has aggregated and revised three decades of detailed post-election academic analyses. Along with laying out the mechanics of Liberal election victories over the past two political generations, Clarkson plots the party's sometimes tortuous course in reconciling its traditional Canadian nationalism with the epochal phenomenon of globalization. Last, he weighs in on a current academic debate: whether the past decade's breakdown of Canada's "two-plus-one" party system of Liberal, PC and NDP has resulted in a new, intelligible configuration of regionally based parties alongside the Grits ("one-plus-three") that may last.
Unfortunately, Clarkson underwrites his narrative. Too often, drama-laden magma seething with ambition, fear and betrayal is buried beneath a cool, analytical crust. For example, the statement, "a consensus emerged among Turner's [1984] campaign advisers that William Lee had to go," cries out for additional detail and verve. But Clarkson sticks to the plain facts, organizing much of the book in a repeating grid. The Big Red Machine's ambitious canvas and rich content cry out for expressive faces and streaks of colour to give the clumps of analytical lines the space they need to make an impact.
Tough reading aside, The Big Red Machine is nonetheless alive with clear, bright thinking. Clarkson "gets" electoral politics. He avoids the journalistic trap of generalizing the popular will, and has a good feel for the ordering of the electorate into coalitions. Liberal campaign planners should read this book, especially the chapters about the Trudeau campaigns, which challenge the memory of a charismatic juggernaut with an evidence-based portrait of spotty organization, weak strategy and frequently indifferent performance.
Of greatest moment to today's political debate is Clarkson's proposition that the Liberal Party's success rests on appropriating (and, in the post-1993 party configuration, monopolizing) the role of national party. This points Clarkson to a seeming paradox. Liberals, according to Clarkson, are successful because they present to Canadians a comfortable, unchanging proposition as to the role of the state: a strong Canada within the federation, the continent and the marketplace.
In our time, however, the federal state is being pulled at from within, by resurgent regionalism, and without, mainly by globalization. Therefore, the Liberal offering is either "deception ..... or self-deception," an "electoral mask," behind which Liberals allow, and sometimes actually encourage, deregulation, privatization, continental integration and globalization.
Liberal government to Clarkson means an autocratic cabal turning the neat trick of peddling nostalgic gestures while quietly destroying the reality of the state they sell to voters one empty symbol at a time. He argues that it is only when the mask falls away that the Liberal Party gets into electoral trouble. This notion is used to explain John Turner's defeats of 1984 and 1988 (a conservative in Liberal clothing), Chrétien's reduction to near-minority status in 1997 (too much deficit-cutting) and Paul Martin's failure to win a majority in 2004 (he played the change agent when he should have stressed continuity).
